


Morale Boost

by ssrhpurgatory



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-11-09 05:10:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20848055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory
Summary: Mir borrowed Rosemary and a few of my other OCs for The End of the Aughts and Nice Work if You Can Get It... so I borrowed that setting back for pain.Reposting to the nonsense account after it was deleted from my other account.





	Morale Boost

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The End Of The Aughts](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14709311) by [mirawonderfulstar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mirawonderfulstar/pseuds/mirawonderfulstar). 

**July 31st, 1998**

"THERE YOU ARE."

Al glanced over his shoulder to see Rosemary storming down the hall of the admin complex towards him, and tried to duck back into the office he'd just exited. "Aw, hell."

"Oh, no you _don't._" Rosemary broke into a dead sprint, moving surprisingly quickly despite the fact that she was a remarkably short woman in heels and a tight skirt. "I _know _this karaoke idea was yours, Al!"

"What makes you think that?" Al asked as she skidded to a stop in front of him.

"It has something of your style about it," Rosemary panted, glaring up at him. "The nasty bit, the _real_ nasty bit, is that you then left _me _in charge of letting Adriane know that attendance was mandatory."

"She threaten you with death?"

"At first. And then, when I argued her around to the inevitability of the thing, she threatened me with a _duet_. You know I can't sing worth a damn, Al!" Rosemary reached up and grabbed him by the tie, hauling him down to her level, and Al let her. Her eyes were wide and wild. "Carter's already got enough dirt on me. Like _hell_ am I giving him even more blackmail material!"

Al laughed. "Rosie, you're overreactin'."

She raised her eyebrows at him. "Am I?"

"Sure are, Rosie my darlin'. Nothin' terrible is going to come out of this." Al cupped his hand around her cheek for a moment, looking her in the eye. "I promise."

Rosemary frowned and released his tie. "I hope you're right."

**August 8th, 1998**

"Now, this song goes out to a very special lady," Al said, picking up the microphone. "I'm sure you all know her name, but in case you don't..."

The first strains of a showtune filled the room. Rosemary groaned and leaned forwards against the table, burying her suddenly overheated face in her hands as Al's baritone joined the music.

"Roooosemary!" he sang, and Rosemary groaned again, dropping her forehead to the table for a moment to cool it before looking up and flagging down one of the waitstaff.

"I need something stronger to deal with this," she said. "What have you got that really burns going down?"

Fortunately, the song was short. Rosemary had only just received a glass a quarter-full of a clear liquid that smelled like death from the waiter when Al appeared behind her chair and dropped a heavy arm across her shoulders.

"Like my present?" Al asked. Rosemary refused to look up at him, but she could hear the grin in his voice.

"If you ever do something like that again, I'm going to punch you so hard you won't be able to talk for weeks," Rosemary muttered, before tossing the entire contents of the glass back at once. She grimaced. It didn't taste any better than it smelled.

"Good thing my face is all the way up here and you're down there, then," Al said.

Rosemary finally turned her head to smile sweetly up at him. "I didn't say I was going to punch you in the _face_, Al. After all, there are certain _very_ sensitive body parts well within my reach at all times."

Al laughed uproariously and lifted his arm from Rosemary's shoulders, then thumped her her shoulder appreciatively with an enormous hand. "Oh, you know me, Rosie. Always willin' to risk the loss of a testicle in order to annoy the hell out of you."

Rosemary huffed irritably and flagged down the waiter again. "Another of whatever the hell that was," she said to the young man, ignoring Al completely. "Actually, make it a double."

Al laughed again, and wandered off to work the crowd.

**August 13th, 1999**

Karl had thought that Rosemary was just teasing him in her usual over-the-top fashion when she'd said she would dress him and drag him off to the company karaoke event herself if she had to, but he'd just settled down to a late supper in his apartment when there was a brisk knock on his door. He opened it a crack to find Rosemary there, one hand still raised to knock, the other holding the garment bag that was slung over her shoulder.

"What do you want?"

"To carry out my threat."

"What is in that bag?" He eyed the garment bag cautiously as Rosemary hauled it off her shoulder and held it out for him.

"A suit."

"For me?"

Rosemary rolled her eyes. "Of course for you, Kelley. They give me your measurements for a reason. Did you think I was going to let you go to another party in, well... _that?_" She looked him up and down, and Karl felt himself blush to the tips of his ears. It was true, he had put off shopping for new clothing for a year or five, and a few of his turtlenecks were getting a little threadbare at this point. But his old clothing was comfortable, and he spent most of his time in a lab, anyway, where the only people who saw him were Rosemary, his lab techs, and the other scientists who worked in the lab complex, many of whom were even more idiosyncratic dressers than he was.

"Well?" Rosemary had raised her eyebrows at him.

"I will try it on," Karl said stiffly, holding his hand out for the garment bag.

Rosemary pulled it back from him. "Oh, no. I don't trust you not to make a dash out the window the minute I turn my back. Open that door the rest of the way and take off your pants."

Karl found himself blushing again, but he opened the door and let Rosemary in.

Rosemary didn't quite carry out her threat of forcibly dressing him, but Karl thought that she might have peeked his way once or twice as he scrambled out of the clothing he'd been wearing all day and into the suit.

And despite the pain that still lingered from years before, when she had broken off their brief relationship, when she had done her best to hurt him, he found himself wondering if she might still feel something for him after all.

She glanced over her shoulder as he slipped into the jacket. "Ready?"

"Just a moment," he responded. "The tie."

"Let me," she said, in a voice that was suddenly low and a little husky. She moved in close, and Karl resisted the urge to back away, froze like an animal in headlights as Rosemary folded up the collar of the shirt, whipped the tie around his neck, knotted it efficiently. Her motions were spare and quick, her gaze on the tie, her fingers only barely touching him as she cinched the knot and folded his collar back down over it, but there was something intimate about the moment anyway, and Karl found he could barely breathe.

Rosemary tweaked his collar once more, then smoothed her hands across his jacket shoulders, looking him up and down. "There. Shall we?"

Karl nodded, his breath still coming in little stutters and starts, and offered her his arm.

Rosemary bit her lower lip for a moment, looking down at the offered arm with an expression strangely close to terror, then took it, and together the two of them made their way from his apartment to the big conference room in the admin building where the party was taking place.

She abandoned him the moment they were through the door, but even still, it felt like the warmth of her arm lingered against his for the rest of the evening.

**August 11th, 2000**

Rosemary winked. "Why don't you sing a quick duet with me and we'll get out of here until Monday when you launch?" She pulled Karl over to the book of songs, and started leafing through it. "How about this one?"

Karl looked at the song title and rolled his eyes. "No. Absolutely not."

"Aw, come on."

Karl fixed her with a piercing glare over the top of his glasses. "Rosie, I am not singing Rasputin with you. It is... demeaning. And inaccurate."

Rosemary snorted, amused. "Well, maybe about Rasputin, but if we apply certain of these lyrics to you..."

"No."

"Oh, fine." She paged through the book again, and pointed another title out. "How about this?"

Karl looked at the title of the song, then back up at Rosemary. Something had changed around her eyes, and for a brief moment he felt... something from her. He set his hand on the book next to hers, ran his forefinger along hers. "Is this really what you want?"

The corner of Rosemary's mouth twitched into a real smile for a moment, and she nodded.

"Then I will." He gestured to the stage. "Shall we?"

"We shall. I have to warn you, though, I'm almost as bad a singer as Gem."

"Which one is Gem again?"

Rosemary laughed, and pulled him after her on to the stage.

**October 21st, 2001**

It had taken them five months to get a ship out to him. Five months where he didn't speak to another human being, where his only company was the Ishtar's quirky AI and the bodies of the dead crew, who he'd put in the cryo storage units for a lack of a better idea. He'd expected Decima to take him too, but he remained untouched.

Five months all alone in space.

Oh, except for the voices.

He must have been hallucinating, he thought later. Five solitary months without human contact would do that to a person.

When Major Kepler showed up on long-range scans in a shuttle with the new temporary crew of the Ishtar, Karl hadn't been able to get his voice to work well enough to respond to their hails. He confirmed receipt of their incoming hails via text. And when the crew actually arrived on the station... well, Major Kepler had tried to interrogate him, but gave up in disgust after the best Karl could do was squeak at him. It would have been funny, in some other time and place.

Karl had been shoved into a cryo unit of his own, and woke up back on Earth, groggy and disoriented, the unfamiliar pull of gravity making every action a chore, a choice. Breathing, blinking, moving... everything was so difficult.

They kept him in a ward for a day, maybe two. He wasn't sure. The passage of time had become a mystery to him. He'd been woken up once by Mr. Carter, but that man's attempts at interrogation didn't go any better than Major Kepler's had, and Carter, too, gave up, throwing his hands in the air and exclaiming "Well, then, I'll just have to wait until you're back in the land of the living."

Karl could only blink, and continue to breathe.

The doctor who'd been observing him declared that there was nothing actually wrong with him the next day, and a nurse bundled Karl into the back of a car. He'd been driven the short distance to where his apartment was; the driver chivvied him back out of the car and handed him a ring of keys, and Karl was left there, standing in front of the apartment building, staring down at the keys blankly.

He didn't even know what day of the week it was.

Old habits must die hard, though, because a few moments later he found himself outside of Rosemary's door instead of his own. He didn't know if he'd knocked, but the door opened anyway, and there was Rosemary, in her ratty old red robe, face clean of makeup, wig off, a look of sympathy on her face.

He'd expected her usual snarky "And why exactly are you bothering me today, Doctor Kelley?"

But instead she reached out and took his hand and pulled Karl inside her apartment, pushing the door shut behind him before wrapping her arms firmly around him and pulling his head down against her shoulder. He let out a strangled cry, and wrapped his arms around her as well, his entire body shaking.

"Hush. I have you. _Ya zdes'_, Dmitri."

Rosemary's Russian accent was just as atrocious as it had always been, and it felt like home.

**December 24th, 2001**

They'd fallen back into their old, painful patterns now, but for Karl's first month back on Earth, Rosemary had almost been gentle with him. She'd eased him back into his schedule bit by bit, extracting him from his apartment every morning and returning him there at night, keeping up half of a light, albeit sarcastic, conversation every time she was near him, reading his responses from his face.

She wouldn't have been Rosemary if she wasn't sarcastic, but this version of her was strangely soft.

He'd started talking again after a week, creaky one-word responses to some of her more outrageous comments. Her smile at the sound of his voice lit up the room, and she had redoubled her efforts to be ridiculous.

As he'd become more himself, so did she, her hard edges reappearing, her comments becoming more biting, but there were still times she was oddly solicitous. She'd insisted to Mr. Carter that she sit in on his interview—his interrogation, more like—and, oh, the expression on her face when he'd gotten so angry at Carter's line of questioning that he blurted out something in Russian about the man being a bitch who didn't understand the dangers of scientific experimentation...

Rosemary had covered for him when Carter turned to her with a "Well, that sounded _awfully_ rude. Was that rude, Rosemary?"

And now, at the company Christmas party, she'd tucked her arm through his and was ferrying him around, keeping him grounded and taking the brunt of any conversation people directed his way.

He looked at the crowd and frowned. One of the women who had just passed him looked strangely familiar. "Rosemary?"

"Hm?"

"Who is that?" He pointed the woman out.

"Captain Eunhee Lee."

Karl frowned. "That cannot be right. She was with Major Kepler. On the Ishtar."

Rosemary looked up at him, startled. "Oh. No one bothered to tell you, then."

"Tell me what?"

"They decided to scrap the Ishtar. Cleaned out everything important, let the station fall into the star. It was too far out. Too expensive to run. Too many... problems."

"I see." Karl swallowed, his throat suddenly dry, and took a drink of the champagne Rosemary had shoved into his empty hand at the start of the evening. "What... what happened to the bodies...?"

Rosemary gave him a pitying look. "Didn't count as everything important, I'm afraid."

"I see." And he did, suddenly.

When Dmitri Vologin had told Mr. Carter all those years ago that human experimentation would become a necessity for his work, he'd been startled by the man's response, but now Karl Kelley understood.

The cost in human lives meant nothing to Carter in the face of progress.

He found himself glancing down at Rosemary and wondering, perhaps for the first time, if she'd sacrificed her life for the cause of progress as well.

**July 7th, 2003**

It had fallen apart again, somehow. Rosemary couldn't help but blame herself. She'd tried, but, well, she'd never really been much of one for domesticity, for the same person in her bed night after night.

For someone spending the entire night in her bed at all, regardless of whether it was for one night or a month of them.

So Rosemary blamed herself, even now, more than a year later, for the slow way it had dissolved, for the fights that had broken them apart again.

But sometimes her weekly meetings with Dr. Kelley were too much to bear. Sometimes she stared at him, her heart aching, and wanted to fling herself across her desk at him, pull him to her, tell him she didn't remember what they'd fought about, that none of it mattered, that they would make it _work_.

She didn't, of course. She would never.

When he wasn't there, in front of her, she couldn't remember why she'd loved him, couldn't remember this feeling that beat hard and fast inside her chest, clutched tight around her heart.

But when she was in the same room as him, she couldn't help but remember the way she'd felt when he'd loved her.

**February 1st, 2011**

Rosemary had passed away that morning. Her cancer had returned, so swiftly, so suddenly, that no one had noticed something was wrong until it was too late to do anything. No last-minute miracle cures this time around.

And now Adriane and her assistants were boxing away every sign that a woman named Rosemary Epps had ever worked at Goddard Futuristics.

Adriane opened one of the large lower drawers in Rosemary's desk, revealing a pile of requisition paperwork, last year's work journal, a selection of the woolen hats in atrocious colors that Rosemary had taken a great deal of pleasure in foisting off on those of the scientists she managed who had not thought to acquire cold-weather gear of their own for times when their work required them to lower the temperature in their labs to an uncomfortable level. And a CD. Not a mass-produced one. Adriane frowned at it, and opened the case, recognizing the handwriting on the CD as belonging to one of the tech group at Goddard. "Karaoke: August 11th, 2000."

Well. She should have expected that. Adriane had always suspected that Rosemary was still stuck on the man, but for Rosemary, keeping this CD was a sign that she had been a good deal more than stuck.

Adriane boxed that drawer up separately, an idea just barely brushing the surface of her mind.

She would find a way. For Rosemary.

**February 4th, 2011**

"Use the communications officer. What's his name again? Lambert." Cutter's voice was brusque, and he was clearly annoyed that Elias had used the emergency pulse beacon relay for something so _minor_ as instructions on what to do now that Mace Fisher had died, bringing Elias's Decima research to a screeching halt.

"Could you speak with Rosemary first? She knows research better than you do. Perhaps she would have some suggestions for alternate ways to move forward, or she could prepare some more biomass samples for next time there is supply shuttle..."

"Rosemary is _far_ too busy to concern herself with something like this. And so am I, Dr. Selberg."

The connection cut off, and Elias Selberg sighed.

Perhaps Lieutenant Lambert would be strong enough to hold up as well as Officer Fisher had.

There was only one way to find out.

**August 10th, 2012**

"Adriane," Kepler drawled.

Adriane eyed the man. "What do you want?"

"A favor."

"I do not do favors for men such as you, _Warren_." Adriane put just enough emphasis on his given name to make it clear that she didn't respect him enough to use his title.

Kepler laughed. "Maybe I can do you a favor in return."

"I highly doubt there are any favors you could do me that I could not accomplish on my own," Adriane said, taking a sip of her drink and making to turn away from him.

"I'm going to the Hephaestus. Sounds like Dr. Selberg's got himself into a hell of a mess out there, and I'm on cleanup duty."

Adriane froze.

"And I might just have space for another box or two in the shuttle along with the other gear we're hauling out there."

"I'm listening," Adriane said, lowering her drink.

Kepler clapped a hand on her shoulder. "I thought you would."

**August 15th, 2012**

The CD showed up in Adriane's office the day before Kepler was supposed to launch, hot off the presses, still wrapped in plastic. 

She wasn't supposed to remove anything from the boxes that went into space, or add anything to the boxes that went to the archives, but she made the swap anyway, taking out the hand-labeled CD and replacing it with "Goddard Futuristics Company Approved Greatest Morale Boosting Karaoke Duets of the 2000s."

It was the best she could do, in the end. Adriane did not trust Elias Selberg to remember the date, after all.

But that track listing, there in black and white on the back of the CD? That, he could not mistake.

And with luck, he might even find it. If not this time, then the next.

**March 2nd, 2015**

They'd given her Selberg's—no, Hilbert's—quarters for the time being, until they could get some of the other crew quarters prepped for use. Isabel didn't really care which set she ended up in; there would be uncomfortable memories wherever she went on this station. There, the form of Fisher packed in to the sleeping nook, which had always been too small for him. There, Lambert coughing himself to death a bit at a time. There, the time she'd gone looking for Hui and Fourier and found them making out in the observatory.

Here...

She looked around the quarters. She thought he must have been just as spartan as Hilbert as he had always been as Selberg, whose quarters had always been empty of any sign of a personal touch. The rest of them had all used their personal weight allowances to bring objects that would remind them of home into space; as far as Isabel had been aware, Selberg—Hilbert, she reminded herself again—had simply used the space for more scientific equipment.

She should have known something was wrong with him then. But she'd figured out what he was really like far, far too late for it to make a difference.

They'd said they'd cleaned it out for her, but Isabel did a thorough check of the room anyway. She wouldn't have put it beyond them to have planted a bug in the room. Not that they necessarily needed to, with the ship's AI, Hera, listening in, but it was theoretically possible to cut a room off entirely from the AI's perception, and that Commander Minkowski struck Isabel as the thorough sort.

She didn't find any bugs.

She did, however, find something much stranger, taped to the wall of a narrow ventilation shaft, almost but not quite out of the line of sight when the vent cover was pried open. Isabel had reached inside and pulled it free before the thought occurred to her that she should have checked for booby traps; if he'd gone to these lengths to hide the item, who knew what else Hilbert might have done? But it came free after a brief tug, and no booby traps were evident.

It was a CD, and, based on the title alone, the last CD she would have ever expected Elias Selberg to have a copy of: "Goddard Futuristics Company Approved Greatest Morale Boosting Karaoke Duets of the 2000s." She read the track list on the back, and let out a little hiss of breath at the sight of the names of her former crew.

And then, before she could think better of it, she headed to the comms room, one place on the ship that she definitely knew there would be a CD player, and a pair of headphones to listen through.

To her surprise, the contents of the CD were exactly what they purported to be. Isabel had somehow expected Hilbert to be using the label on the disc as a cover for, oh, she didn't know, his audio logs of the Decima research or something. But when she started the CD player up and inserted the disc, the sound of Grease started blaring through the headphones. She winced and adjusted the volume, then skipped ahead to track 5, her breath catching in her throat at the sound of Hui and Fourier's voices, hamming it up as they sang the Time Warp together. God. They'd been so young, and so close, right from the beginning.

When the track ended, she hit the skip button to get to track 12, but she hadn't been paying much attention to the display and must have hit it one time too few. The bouncy, upbeat song caught her ear, though, so she decided to give herself a break before wallowing in nostalgia again.

And then the voices started, and one of them was Selberg. Hilbert. Kelley, too, apparently, she discovered as she looked at the back of the CD case.

And he sounded... happy.

Isabel didn't recognize the voice of the woman on the track—some long-departed Goddard Futuristics employee, she supposed—but whoever she was, as the song went on...

Dear God.

Isabel stared at the CD case in consternation. Had Selberg been... in love? She didn't believe it, couldn't believe that he'd ever felt such a human emotion.

But when the track ended, instead of moving on to the track featuring her entire crew—well, all but Selberg, though given how distinctive his voice was and the obvious evidence that this hadn't been the first time he'd changed his name, she now understood that he hadn't declined them out of stage fright—she hit the back button and listened to the song again.

So.

Maybe he had once been human, under it all.

Could he be human again?

**March 24th, 2015**

"Is this real?"

A small object came flying across the observation deck at Alexander Hilbert, impacting him in the middle of the chest with a small, sharp corner. He snagged it before it floated out of the reach of his chains and looked at it, frowning. It was a CD case. He squinted to make out the title in the blue light from the star. "Goddard Futuristics Company Approved Greatest Morale Boosting Karaoke Duets of the 2000s."

"Yes," he said grudgingly.

"So?"

"So what?"

"So tell me about her," Captain Lovelace said, her posture indicating she would have crossed her arms over her chest if she hadn't still been healing from the wound she'd received a few days before.

"About who, exactly?"

"That Epps woman."

Alexander couldn't meet the captain's eye. "There is nothing to tell."

"Goddamnit, Selberg."

He looked up. "I am sorry?"

Lovelace was glaring at him. "Minkowski says things are bad enough we need an extra set of hands around here to keep this station afloat, and as much as I hate to admit it, she's probably right. But right now, I'm still dubious about keeping you alive, let alone giving you the run of the station. So give me a reason to believe that there's something human under that calculating mind of yours before I give in to the urge to drag you to the nearest airlock and blow you off this station."

Alexander looked down at the CD again, running his thumb over the track listing. "She was my lab manager."

"And?"

"And what?"

"Have you listened to that CD?"

"I do not understand what you are trying to ask, Lovelace."

Lovelace sighed, sounding exasperated. "Did you love her?"

"Ah." Alexander shut his eyes and sighed as well. "Yes."

"Where is she now?"

"Dead."

"Another of your casualties?" Lovelace asked, her voice suddenly harsh.

Alexander shook his head. "During our mission. She... there was a recurrence. She had cancer. It came back." He swallowed, trying to dislodge the sudden lump in his throat. "She was older. She was always going to go first. But I did not expect it to happen like that."

Lovelace was staring at him, a little frown between her eyebrows.

And then, without saying another word, she crossed the room and released him from his chains, then left him there, leaving the door open behind her.

  



End file.
